Katherine Keane

“Breaking the Frame” is an art installation that explores the connection between visual perception and time by displacing the user’s reflection over time and space.

The act of looking in a mirror is simple and familiar: the mirror traditionally reflects a real-time image of its beholder. “Breaking the Frame” shows the user’s reflection, but also absorbs that reflection and re-presents it in new times and locations, allowing us to experience the current moment as it becomes the past.

Eventually, the user learns to take these consecutive moments into account and employ this experimental platform to play with his or her reflection.

BackgroundCrary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: on vision and modernity in the nineteenth century. Boston: MIT Press, 1992.

Gregory, R.L. Eye and Brain: the psychology of seeing. 3rd ed. New York: World University Library, 1978.